It is one of the shortest books in this room and one of the most influential. In its shorter form it fills only a few pages. Its Hebrew name is Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, and tradition ascribes it to Abraham the patriarch; its last paragraph tells how Abraham looked, and saw, and understood, and was shown its secrets. Scholars place its writing in late antiquity, most often somewhere between the second and the sixth centuries, though some would put it later. No one knows who wrote it. Every later Kabbalist read it, and nearly every modern school of the tarot and the Kabbalah claims it as an authority. Very few of them have read it closely, and the pages of the Discernment room tell what has followed from that.
What It Says
The book begins: with thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom the Lord engraved, and created his world. The thirty-two paths are ten sefirot and twenty-two letters.
The word sefirot, which later Kabbalists would use for the ten emanations of God, here seems to mean something closer to numbers, or countings. The book calls them ten sefirot of nothingness, or of closure, and insists on their number: ten and not nine, ten and not eleven; understand with wisdom, and be wise with understanding. The first four are the spirit of the living God, and air from spirit, and water from air, and fire from water. The other six are the six directions of space, up and down and the four quarters of the world, sealed with the letters of the divine name. Elsewhere the book speaks of the ten as depths: a depth of beginning and a depth of end, a depth of good and a depth of evil, a depth above and a depth below, and the depths of east and west and north and south.
The twenty-two letters are the book's real subject. God engraved them, carved them, weighed them, exchanged them, and combined them, and formed with them everything that has been formed and everything that will be. The letters fall into three families.
- The three mothers: Aleph, Mem, and Shin. They are air, water, and fire: in the world, in the year as temperate, cold, and hot, and in the body as chest, belly, and head.
- The seven doubles: Beth, Gimel, Daleth, Kaph, Peh, Resh, and Tav. They are called double because each was pronounced in two ways, hard and soft, and because each carries a pair of opposites: wisdom and folly, wealth and poverty, seed and desolation, life and death, dominion and servitude, peace and war, grace and ugliness. With them were formed the seven planets in the universe, the seven days in the year, and the seven gates of the soul in the face: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and the mouth.
- The twelve simples: He, Vav, Zayin, Cheth, Teth, Yod, Lamed, Nun, Samekh, Ayin, Tzaddi, and Qoph. With them were formed the twelve signs of the zodiac, the twelve months, and twelve faculties of a human being: sight, hearing, smell, speech, taste, union, work, movement, anger, laughter, thought, and sleep.
What the book offers, in short, is a cosmology of language. The world is made of the same letters as the scripture that tells of its making. A reader who remembers that Genesis has God make the world by speaking, and let there be light, will hear the book's root at once.
Three Versions and a Critical Edition
The Book of Formation has come down in three main versions: a shorter, a longer, and a third that was read and commented on by a great rabbi of Babylonia in the tenth century. They differ in many small ways and in one large one: which planet, and which pair of opposites, belongs with which of the seven double letters. For most of the book's modern history readers had to choose among the versions more or less by taste, and the choice made a great deal of difference to anyone who built on it.
In 2004 a scholar of Hebrew at Edinburgh published a critical edition on which he had worked for some twenty years, setting the manuscripts of all three versions side by side and recovering, as far as the evidence allows, the oldest form of the text. In that form the seven planets are named in the old Chaldean order, the order of their speed as seen from the earth, slowest to swiftest: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. And they are set on the seven doubles in that same order, Beth to Tav: Saturn on Beth, Jupiter on Gimel, Mars on Daleth, the Sun on Kaph, Venus on Peh, Mercury on Resh, and the Moon on Tav. The page The Secret Chiefs tells how a London order of the nineteenth century set these aside, and why it matters.
What It Does Not Say
A student who has met the Book of Formation only through the modern schools may be surprised by what it does not contain. It does not draw a tree. It does not name the ten sefirot as crown, wisdom, understanding, mercy, strength, beauty, victory, splendor, foundation, and kingdom; those names came with the Book of Brightness in twelfth-century Provence and the Zohar in thirteenth-century Spain, where the Kabbalah proper begins. The familiar diagram of ten circles in three columns joined by twenty-two lines was drawn later still, and in more than one arrangement. The book does not mention the tarot, which would not be invented for another thousand years.
The later Kabbalists built a great house on its foundation. They spoke of four worlds through which the divine abundance, which they called shefa, flows down into ours, and they called the third of the four Yetzirah, formation, the same word that names this book. Some modern students try to chart the moving sky against the sefirot, to see which of the worlds is lit at a given hour. That is a modern undertaking, and the student should know it as one. It is not something the book itself describes.
Nor does the book teach magic, though legends gathered around it. The Talmud tells of two rabbis who studied the laws of formation every Sabbath eve and created a calf, which they then ate for their Sabbath meal, and from such stories the later tales of the golem grew. The book itself is quieter than its legends. It is a meditation on creation, not a manual for repeating it.
Why It Matters to an Essene Student
No one can draw a line from the caves by the Dead Sea to the Book of Formation, and the fellowship will not pretend to. But the student of the Essene way has three reasons to know it.
First, it belongs to the same family of wonder as the books the Essenes loved. The Book of Enoch has an angel teach the true courses of the sun and moon; the desert community kept a calendar of 364 days it believed heaven had given; the Book of Formation finds the planets and the months and the gates of the face written into the alphabet itself. All three read creation as ordered, by number and by word, and open to the one who studies it with reverence.
Second, because nearly every modern school claims it. A student who wishes to test what she is taught about the Kabbalah or the cards needs to know what the book on which it all claims to rest actually says. The pages The Cards and the Letters and Paths, Not Steps show why.
Third, and to us most important, because of a single sentence in its first chapter. Restrain your mouth from speaking and your heart from thinking, it says, and if your heart runs, return to the place; for so it is written, the living creatures ran and returned. The fellowship knows no better instruction for meditation in so few words. It is the whole of the Still Lamp: when the heart runs, return.
How the Fellowship Reads It
Slowly, and as a meditation rather than a system. We do not practice the permutation of letters or any of the later operative uses of the book. We read it for three things: its picture of a world made by speech, so that every created thing is a word; its strange insistence on exact number, ten and not nine, which is a kind of humility before the order of things; and its instruction to the running heart. A student should find a translation that says plainly which of the versions it follows, and read the first chapter many times before going on. As with every text in this room, the method is the one described in How We Read.